


every love scene begins with a man in a doorway

by Zabbers



Category: The Thick Of It
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 06:19:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1459081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was a fill for a TTOI kinkmeme prompt that I filled a very long time ago (October 2012), when series 4 was airing and I was dipping my toes into the water. "Everyone just assumed they were sleeping together while Jamie still worked at Number 10. It didn't even crossed their minds to actually do it until 6 months after Jamie had left the job." Rediscovering it today as I'm in much deeper than I ever was before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every love scene begins with a man in a doorway

Afterwards, when it’s all over, Jamie comes round, just once. 

It’s a Sunday, and he’s in a suit, not one of his work suits, but something indefinably different: coarser, less fitted, the sort of suit someone who spends his life in jeans and galoshes puts on, not to look professional, but out of respect, and Malcolm knows that Jamie’s just come from church, because the little sod still goes to mass every week in spite of everything. Because this is the suit Malcolm first saw him in, twenty years ago, when he was trying and failing not to look like a man who’d gone straight from the estate to the seminary. Malcolm knows, too, that Jamie must have called in favours to find out that he’d be at home today, instead of babysitting a minister on a Sunday interview or making fucking waffles for the good of the Party.

God—and everyone—knows he doesn’t have the power to threaten any more, though perhaps he can still frighten. Given the bright craze in his eyes, Malcolm thinks the latter is just a little too possible.

Malcolm’s in mufti. He’s actually trying to relax, for once, because he’s had to admit even if only to himself that this time, things might have gotten a bit out of hand, he might have let it matter a little too much, and his heart, well…

It tightens a wee bit in his chest at the sight of his former lieutenant (the traitorous cunt) stood on his doorstep, looking like he has stepped directly from their shared past, never mind the years and the crows’ feet in between.

Malcolm has a sudden and rare insight, the kind about himself, that he has been deliberately, systematically misinterpreting that sensation as the thrill of a political job well done, the emotional high of crisis-managing the combined fuck-tonne of idiocy in Whitehall out of sailing his party onto the proverbial shit rocks. Of winning. 

He could excuse himself the lie, if he wanted to. It _has_ always coincided with the genuine pleasures of these things. Always that is, until now.

He hesitates a long time at the door, or what feels like a long time, caught between the merits of firmly and definitively closing the door in Jamie’s face and the urge, the need to find out whether it’s the same revelation that has led him to this spot, right now, whether that realisation came to him while the incense was swinging by or Monseigneur was mumbling his incoherent syllables that might have been English or Scottish or Latin.

But, on reflection, it can’t have been very long at all, because Jamie MacDonald is not one to hesitate, once (or even before) he’s decided something, and even as the afterimage of the strangely still, shiny eyes are fading from his vision, Malcolm finds the shorter man pushing past him into the house, taking possession of the space as he has taken possession of everything of Malcolm’s since they started working together, as though one were the extension of the other.

Malcolm has never questioned this before. After all, you didn’t differentiate between what was yours and what belonged to your champion collie, because it was all yours. The sheep, the fields, the rug before the fire at night. (And Jamie was the closest Malcolm would ever come to sharing his space with an _animal_ , feral or tame.)

Jamie, for all his professional intimacy with his former boss, has never been to Malcolm’s house before. Never followed him home from the office. Never had to: in times of need, they both obviously lived at work. He looks around at everything with a sort of territorial hunger, touching with his eyes, and Malcolm feels fucking foolish for thinking it, but it makes him feel naked, laid out like a sacrifice or a corpse for Jamie’s scrutiny. He wonders if this is how they feel, the ones he sets Jamie on, and then he’s jealous that they’ve had this attention all along and he hasn’t, then he tells himself off for a fool again, for entertaining thoughts like this, like he’s turned into a jessie all of a sudden.

“Jamie,” he says at last, because Jamie is still stalking his home, and the tension is morphing into bewilderment.

Jamie’s focus turns to him with a wholeness and intensity that threatens to stagger him. His eyes—have they ever or always been so blue? But he’s wordless, just looking, more wild creature than reasoning man, sane or otherwise. 

So it’s up to Malcolm to forge on, words (their tools, their toys, forsaking them both in this time of extremis), plans, the usual three steps ahead not really at his command. “What the hell are ye doing here, Jamie?”

Jamie looks stricken at the question, and this is another thing that Malcolm knows, in this unexpected afternoon of not knowing: that although Jamie went to the trouble to find out where Malcolm would be and to seek him out, he doesnae have a plan either. In typical Jamie fashion, he was taken with an impulse, a certainty, and on the strength of that conviction he is here, waiting for Malcolm to tell him what to do with it.

And the power of that—Malcolm has been taking it for granted. It’s, it is so much more than all of the power he has held over any of the workings of Government, over the Party, over the PM, over the Press and the bollock-shrivelled Ministers and all of their shit-panicking minions and the whole incompetent fucking free world.

Because it’s all over, Malcolm can’t do anything to him now, can’t give him a damned thing either, and yet, Jamie is here.

And when Malcolm pushes him against his bare living room wall, when he wrests out of the way those obscene pious relics, the printed tie and the brown jacket and the auld, the very auld shirt, that stand in the way of faithful skin, when he bends his head and presses his mouth over the mouth he has stupidly, idiotically never before thought to kiss, he knows, he knows that Jamie—that he doesn’t have to fight, not for this, not today; he’s fought for it already, a thousand times, ten thousand, and he’s never had to, never.

Only now, after all the glorious fucking bullshit, now they know.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Hannah Gamble's poem "Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast"


End file.
